The research and teaching activities at our institute focus on geometry acquisition and processing, on interactive visualization, and on related areas such as computer vision, photo-realistic image synthesis, and ultra high speed multimedia data transmission.

In our projects we are cooperating with various industry companies as well as with academic research groups around the world. Results are published and presented at high-profile conferences and symposia. Additional funding sources, among others, are the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the European Union.

Prof. Kobbelt has been named RWTH Fellowfor his outstanding research performance and his great merits for RWTH Aachen University.

April 5, 2019

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We have a paper on String-Based Synthesis of Structured Shapes at Eurographics 2019.

March 19, 2019

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We have presented a paper on Correspondence Learning on Unstructured 3D Meshes at the ECCV 2018 Workshop GMDL.

Sept. 18, 2018

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We have a paper on Interactive Curve Constrained Functional Maps at the Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing 2018.

June 21, 2018

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We have a paper on Feature Curve Co-Completion in Noisy Data at Eurographics 2018.

Feb. 8, 2018

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Geometry Lab Exhibition

On November 3–5 we will be staging the Geometry Lab: an event where works of art meet scientific exhibits. Located in the Ludwig Forum art gallery, the exhibition displays an entire spectrum from classical geometric phenomena to modern research areas. In addition, workshops will be held for participants to fold paper into fascinating forms, build complex structures with Zometool, or even assemble their very own 3D printer.

The generation of quad meshes based on surface parametrization techniques has proven to be a versatile approach. These techniques quantize an initial seamless parametrization so as to obtain an integer grid map implying a pure quad mesh. State-of-the-art methods following this approach have to assume that the surface to be meshed either has no boundary, or has a boundary which the resulting mesh is supposed to be aligned to. In a variety of applications this is not desirable and non-boundary-aligned meshes or grid-parametrizations are preferred. We thus present a technique to robustly generate integer grid maps which are either boundary-aligned, non-boundary-aligned, or partially boundary-aligned, just as required by different applications. We thereby generalize previous work to this broader setting. This enables the reliable generation of trimmed quad meshes with partial elements along the boundary, preferable in various scenarios, from tiled texturing over design and modeling to fabrication and architecture, due to fewer constraints and hence higher overall mesh quality and other benefits in terms of aesthetics and flexibility.

We propose a novel method to synthesize geometric models from a given class of context-aware structured shapes such as buildings and other man-made objects. Our central idea is to leverage powerful machine learning methods from the area of natural language processing for this task. To this end, we propose a technique that maps shapes to strings and vice versa, through an intermediate shape graph representation. We then convert procedurally generated shape repositories into text databases that in turn can be used to train a variational autoencoder which enables higher level shape manipulation and synthesis like, e.g., interpolation and sampling via its continuous latent space.

Functional maps have gained popularity as a versatile framework for representing intrinsic correspondence between 3D shapes using algebraic machinery. A key ingredient for this framework is the ability to find pairs of corresponding functions (typically, feature descriptors) across the shapes. This is a challenging problem on its own, and when the shapes are strongly non-isometric, nearly impossible to solve automatically. In this paper, we use feature curve correspondences to provide flexible abstractions of semantically similar parts of non-isometric shapes. We design a user interface implementing an interactive process for constructing shape correspondence, allowing the user to update the functional map at interactive rates by introducing feature curve correspondences. We add feature curve preservation constraints to the functional map framework and propose an efficient numerical method to optimize the map with immediate feedback. Experimental results show that our approach establishes correspondences between geometrically diverse shapes with just a few clicks.